In order to appreciate the compulsion that compelled him to purchase a copy of the enormous comic book anthology COMIC BOOK TATTOO, one has to imagine a 16 year-old version of the reviewer sitting in front of the television in his parents’ basement. It’s 1992 and he’s flipping across the then-not-so-wide spectrum of channels as most bored teenagers are wont to do during moments of uninspired inactivity. His flipping stops when he catches sight of a hot, redhead in a music video he has never seen before. She looks right at him and sings, “Every finger in the room is pointing at me / I wanna spit in their faces, then I get afraid what that could bring / I got a bowling ball in my stomach / I got a desert in my mouth. Figures that my courage would choose to sell out now….”
As soon as he can he gets his hands on a copy of the album this song appears on. He then does something he has never done before and sits down and listens to the whole thing from beginning to end — and, like thousands of other alienated teenagers that year, undergoes his own personal, unforgettable little earthquake.
Hello, my name is Allan and I am a Tori Amos fanatic.
It is, I admit, a most uncool condition to profess to — Tori Amos fanaticism being a clear sign to most people that a person is an asshole of the first order — but the wonderful thing about fanaticism is that it prevents you from giving a shit about what anybody thinks of the object of your devoted admiration.
So, when I saw that Image Comics had released a massive (literally, this thing is freaking huge) collection of graphic short stories inspired by the music of my favorite piano-playing dream babe, I had no choice but to buy it and lug it all the way home, if only for the fact that it was Amos’ foreword to Neil Gaiman’s DEATH: THE HIGH COST OF LIVING that got me back into the habit of reading comic books in the first place.
And now having slowly made my way through the 50 or so stories that make up the title, I can now report to you that as a book, COMIC BOOK TATTOO is surprisingly and endearingly just like Amos’ last several albums: It’s far too long for its own good and filled with equal measures of obscure self-indulgence and inspired brilliance.
On the inspired side, I would count such offerings as Rantz A. Holsey and Ming Doyle’s “The Waitress,” which turns Amos’ ode to female wrath into a story of a screenwriting duo’s inevitable Hollywood corruption and downfall; John Ney Ritter and Ryan Kelly’s “Winter,” in which a troubled young woman learns that her father is still alive and ready to pass down onto her a tremendous responsibility; Jeremy Haun’s “Jackie’s Strength,” a wordless tale of a woman who uses a handgun to solve the problem of a messy relationship; Mike Maihack’s darkly adorable “Caught a Lite Sneeze,” the only story to feature fairies in the whole book; the horrific boarding school nightmare of Seth Peck and Daniel Heard’s “Cornflake Girl”; and Lief Jone’s comic Southern Gothic tale of a whore’s freakish unwanted daughter, “New Amsterdam.”
But there is much worthwhile to be found in the stories that don’t work quite as well, and even in those that downright fail. Kako’s “Marianne,” for example, makes no sense at all as it intercuts between images of an amusement park ride and a pollinating bumblebee, but the images themselves are astonishing beautiful, and one does have to admit that it is as lucid as the song that inspired it (featuring as it does the memorably incoherent lyric “the weasel squeaks faster than a seven-day week”). The same is true of Omaha Perez’s “Father Lucifer,” which one can tell is an intensely personal story, even if you have no idea what that story actually is.
The question is, however, will the book mean anything to people who don’t know their Tori Amos from their Kate Bush, or even those who do know her work yet outright detest every last bit of it? Well, that depends entirely on how much they enjoy collections of pretentious independent comic book art. By that standard, COMIC BOOK TATTOO is one of the most impressive I’ve ever read — not just in terms of content, but design as well.
I’ve mentioned already how big the book is, but it’s actually even bigger than you can imagine — a true coffee-table book in the sense that the only way you can read it comfortably is by placing it flat in front of you on a convenient horizontal surface. Having shown it to various friends and acquaintances, I have yet to have one not express genuine shock upon being told it only cost $29.99, as it so clearly resembles the kind of heavy collectables that usually sell for hundreds of dollars. For that reason alone, the book is must-buy for anyone interested in the woman who inspired it or offbeat comics in general.
And, if it helps, you are unlikely to find another comic anthology filled with more illustrations of hot redheads outside of a copy of SHOWCASE PRESENTS BATGIRL.
Trust me, that helps. —Allan Mott
Related posts:
- Free Comic Book Day 2006 Roundup
- Free Comic Book Day 2007 Roundup
- Why Comic-Book Geeks Need to Get Over Comic-Book Movies
- Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book
- The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
